The Evils of Deforestation.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 19, 12 May 1909, Page 28

The Evils of Deforestation.

n. (By I. P. nROSSJIAXN. 31. A.. Director of School of Commerce.. A.V.C.) Landslips and Floods. ROREMOST among the inevitable effects of deforestation we must, therefore rank floods and landslips. It must be clearly understood that this description of the effects of bushfelling is by no means simply theoretical. Unfortunately. the theory has been illustrated in only too literal and practical a fashion in all the countries that have ever been endowed with great natural forests. In America this question has ulreadv a — timed the dimensions of a great national problem, and the disastrous results of erosion are dwelt on im-pre-sively in the report recently presented tc emigres- by the National Conservation Commission. “One small neglected stream," we are told, "ha- been found hv actual measurement to wash enough -oil from its hill- to deposit -ilt equal to one and a half ton- per acre of its watershed in a year. The quantity of -ilt deposited every year by -all the streams in the United States would cover a territory nine hundred mile- square a foot deep. Our river- have wa-hed 753 million ton- of the best soil of the

United States from the upland farms and carried it into the rivers, where it has formed bars, impeded navigation and fit.ally lodged in the great harbours. The Government has already spent 553 mil-

lion- of dollars for river and harbour improvements." and this outlay has been rendered necessary almost entirely through the indirect effects of deforestation. The Commission estimates

that soil erosion reduces farm production from 10 to 20 per eent.; -and that the annual loss to the farms alone is 500 million dollars. The direct damage from floods has increased from

45 million dollar- in 1900 to 238 million dollars in 1907—and all this enormous expenditure and 10-s is attributed by this responsible Commission of experts to the reckless slaughter of the forests.

Corroborative Evidence. This conclusion is supported by a host of other witnesses. Mr. A. W. Page, in an article on the "Statesmanship of Forestry." points out that the Colorado in flood time carries down 1090 tons of mud a minute, simply because all the trees have been cut away on its watershed. "River- whose headwaters have been deforested are beginning to carry mud in this way, building up banks and bars, changing their courses and ruining navigation": and most of the trouble with the Mississippi which is now to be deepened and straightened at a colossal cost, is due to deforestation. In two months in 1905. the floods on the Catawba River, we are told, did a million and a half dollars’ worth of damage. When they subsided some farmers found sandbanks ten feet deep on their fertile acres. Mr. Stewart White, the famous novelist of the North, says that IS million acres of farm land have been lost in the Appalachian district in a few rears by erosion alone. Ten years ago Professor Shaler. of Harvard University, estimate! that 3000 square miles of soil bad been washed from the slopes of the Southern Mountains on account of the destruction of the forests. The upper valley- of the rivers are becoming subject to violent freshets, and the lower valleys to great overflows which have to be controlled by costly levees. And the destruction so far,” adds Mr. Page. “ has been only enough to give an imaginative man a conception of what floods will come from those mountains if all their forests are ever cut down.” But unhappily it is not necessary to limit ourselves to conjecture a- to what may happen in extreme cases of this kind. In at least one country in modern times we have seen exemplified on the largest conceivable scale the terrible consequences of defying the ordinances of Nature by destroying the forests and neglecting to replace them. " China.” write- Mr. Emerson Hough, dealing with " The Slaughter of the Trees ” in "Everybodv's Magazine” (May, 1908), "is the

best instance of a land that never cared for forestry. She builds houses now of little poles, uses for fuel saplings, shrubs, herbage. Her children literally comb the hillsides for bits of roots and shrubs for

fuel and fodder. The land is bared to the bone. It is a land of floods. Villages are swept away, hard-tilled fields ruined Starvation always stalks in China. Alternate floods and water famines follow the waste of forests.” The most striking il-

lustration of these evils in the history of Chma is the record of the Hwang Ho, the great Yellow River which drains the Northern Provinces, and twice within the last forty years has flooded vast areas of densely peopled country, destroying mil-

lions of the inhabitants in a few hours. In the great flood of 1868, and again in 1887. the Hwang-Ho is credited with something like seven million victims: and considering that the floods covered ten thousand square miles of territory, studded with 3000 villages, the estimate is probably not excessive. Possibly th? illustrations to this paper—some of which were submitted to Congress by President Roosevelt, with his last Message, in which he dealt with the necessity for reforesting the United . States—may give some faint idea of the ruin and desolation that thus inevitably follow the Passing of the Forest. In China the work of destruction is still going on. The Hwang Ho is periodically flooded, and millions of lives are sacrificed simply because the forests in Northern China have been cut down and never replaced. “ They cut off the trees then the shrubs, then the grass until not a single living thing remained on the mountain sides. The rain washed the soil from the rocks. With infinite patience every year they build terraces wherever they can to save a little of the soil for agriculture. The once fertile valley lands are covered with gravel and rocks, the debris of floods. The territory that was once fertile is now bare, its flourishing cities are falling into decay, the land is becoming uninhabitable.” And all this devastation and waste of property and life, and this destruction of man’s handiwork have been due to the reckless cutting down of forests. The picture of desolation that some of these illustrations reveal may stand as a general type of the effects of deforestation in all countries in varying degrees. The loss of fertile soil, the submergence of productive land under a superincumbent load of barren debris and detritus from the hillsides, the choking of river beds, the diversion of rivers from their courses, and the disastrous floods that inevitably follow such changes —all these evils are in every land the direct consequence of the wholesale extirpation of timber trees.

What Other Countries Suffer.

It would be easy to accumulate great masses of evidence of a character similar to the foregoing, but I may content myself with a few typical

instances. In Stanford’s ‘•Compendium of Geography and Travel,” I find the following reference to Cyprus in regard to deforestation and its effects:—“The disappearance of the woods, now reduced to about 400 square miles in the southern

uplands, has seriously a fleeted agricultural prospects. With the forests went the soil which was washed down to the plains, choked the river beds and formed malarious swamps: the hills became bare rocks incapable of growing a blade of grass, and the locust at once took possession of the barren ground: whilst the

absence of trees deprived the earth of its annual fertilising leaf mould. There is now a stony desert at the S.E. end of the island, where tradition says there was formerly a large forest." The same story might be told even more forcibly of Asia-Minor, once the garden of the world, filled with densely peopled towns, now for the most part treeless, waterless, sterile, and almost depopulated. Of Spain it has been said that the loss of her wealth and power, and the

decay of her Empire, were due more than anything else to the impoverishment of her soil through the destruction of her forests. Describing Central Spain Sir A. Ford writes; "The denuded tablelands are exposed to the tierce suns of the summer and to the fiercer snows and winds of winter, while the bulk of the peninsula offers a picture of neglect and

desolation, moral and physical, which it is painful to contemplate. Extensive steppes and plains are burnt by the sun in summer and swept by the iey winds in winter; while rain is so rare in the tablelands that the annual fall does not exceed 9 inches, and there are districts on which no shower descends for eight Or nine months together. The face of the earth is tanned tawny, and baked, into a veritable ‘terra cotta,’ and everything seems dead and burnt as on a funeral pile.” Mr G. Chisholm, one of the most eminent of living geographers, describing the basin of the Po, in Northern Italy, says of the risk of floods to which it is constantly exposed: — “These dangers have been much increased by the wanton destruction of the forests of the Alps and Apennines, for when the shelter of the woods is gone, the heavy rains of summer easily wash the soil from the slopes down into the rivers, and many an upland pasture has by this process been turned into bare rock.” Referring elsewhere- to the malarial. swamps in North Italy, the same authority writes:—“Since ancient times, the extent of marsh has in many places been increased through the excessive clearing of mountain forests, causing rain-water to rush unchecked down the mountain sides, and the rivers to swell into devastating fleo The Case of France. But perhaps the best illustration of the evils and dangers to which all countries are exposed by the process of deforestation is to be found in the meteorological and topographical history <jf France during the _paat century. Dr. Croumbie Brown, in his work on “Reboissement (reforestation; in France,” gives a complete account of the causes that led to the clearing of the forests in the Lower Alps and the Pyrenees, arid the results that followed in the form of landslips and floods. The details that he gives of the devastations committed by the mountain torrents, augmenting every year with the cutting out of forest and undergrowth form a picture that has been truthfully described as appalling. “The disappearance of the forests from the mountains.” writes Captain Camp-bell-Walker. "gave up the soil to the action of the waters which swept it away, into the valleys, and then the torrents, becoming more and more devastating, buried extensive tracts under their deposits, tracCs which will prole ably be for ever withdrawn from agriculture.” And hot only has irreparable injury been thus inflicted upon the country. but enormous losses of property, end even of human life, have been sustained a direct consequence of these same baneful causes. During 1875 the loss of property in the South of France through floods was estimated by the State at £3,000,000, and in addition at least 3.000 people lost their lives. “The indirect results in the shape of temporary or permanent damage to agricultural districts by the deposit of stones and shingle brought from the mountains by the flood waters cannot be estimated, still less the damage to pastoral lands on the mountains themselves. It may be stated generally that the results of excessive clearing of forests and abuse of pasturage on the French Alps and Pyrenees have reduced their capacity as a sheep ami goat carrying area to sneh an extent that they cannot carry half of what they did fifty years ago; whilst the damage resulting to the agricultural districts below from the drying up of springs and streams, the torrents caused by heavy rains, and the melting of the snows and their effect on the river banks and channels followed by long droughts in summer is simply incalculable, and such as cannot bo repaired, even at a large expenditure within two generations.” This was written over thirty years ago, but it is as true to-day as it was then, ami the moral to be drawn from it applies not more direetlv to France than to any other country in which the same conditions and causes are already developing the same inevitable series of consequences. Costly Remedies. That the injury thus sustained is real and serious is sufficiently established by the strenuous efforts made in various

countries to <»q>e with the evil of deforestation. The harm done by the reckless destruction of forests has been manifested perhaps more clearly in France than elsewhere, and the French Government hAs made the most vigorous exertion* to remedy the evils produced by the neglect of centuries. The system known as “rehoissement” will eventually result in re-clothing with forest all the denuded mountain ranges in the south-eastern districts and departments of France. Commencing with the most important points —the sources, head waters and upper reaches of streams, and the gullies extending up to the lofty ridges where water is precipitated from the clonds or accumulated from the melting snows — systematic re-planting has lieen carried on for a considerable number of years, ■with results that at least justify the Government in prosecuting the work on a constantly expanding scale. Many years ago Surell. in his work on Alpine mountain streams, described, the condition of the deforested regions of Southern France. Italy and Switzerland as almost hopeless. "The country is becoming depopulated day by day. Ruined in their cultivation of the ground, the inhabitants emigrate to a great distance from their desolated lands, and contrary to the usual practice of mountaineers, many of them never return. There may be seen on all hands cabins deserted or in ruins, and already in some localities there are more fields than labourers. The precarious state of these fields discourages the population left. They abandon the plough, and invest all their resources in flocks. But these flocks expedite the ruin of the country, which would be destroyed by them alone. Every year their number diminishes in consequence of want of pasture grounds. Thus the inhabitants who sacrifice all their soil for their floeks. will not leave even this inheritance to their descendants.” It is clear that such conditions mean the absolute and irretrievable ruin of a country so affected; and the magnitude of these disasters indicates also that nothing but a very heavy annual expenditure, continued over a long series of years—perhaps for a century or more—will even stay the process of destruction, to say nothing of repairing the losses and restoring the land to anything like its original fertility. Such a prospect might well discourage the wealthiest and most enterprising of States if their efforts were not stimulated by another motive that appeals to them perhaps quite as effectually as the instinct of self-preservation roused by the losses and injuries that I have attempted to de-

scril*’. I refer to th * growing scarcity of timber resulting from the destruction of the world’s invaluable stock of forest trees. (To he Continued.)

Seated in his robes of office is the New Mayor of Wellington. Dr. Newman. On his right is the Hon. T. W. Hislop, the retiring Mayor The others are Councillors ami Officials.

In the second act of “ The Dairymaids,” which will be produced at His Majesty’s Auckland, on Monday, the 17th inst. See "Music and Drama.”

Sitting in the middle of front row, with his hat on, is the Hon. Mr. Buddo, Minister in charge. On his right is Mr. G. F. C. Campbell, Valuer-General, and on his left is Mr. A. E. Fowler, Chief Clerk.